II
The Praetorian prefect Tigellinus stood in the Forum, looking approvingly at the bustle of early-morning activity around the shops of the Aemilian Basilica. If business for the shopkeepers of the Aemila this winter’s day was good, then that was good for Tigellinus. For, not only was Tigellinus one of the two prefects in charge of the Praetorian Cohorts. Tigellinus was also a man of business.
The first emperor of Rome, Augustus, had resumed the ancient practice of putting two prefects over the Praetorian Cohorts. Rome’s oldest military unit had been created by the praetors of Rome as their personal protection force after the formation of the Roman Republic in 509 BC. Later, the two consuls elected to power each year had controlled the Praetorian Cohorts, with each appointing one senior officer to jointly command them. By the time of Julius Caesar, the Praetorian Cohorts had fallen into disuse, only to be reformed by Mark Antony in 44 BC in the wake of Caesar’s assassination, again as a personal protection force. At that time, the most senior Praetorian officers were their tribunes. This changed with the coming of the emperors. Augustus made the Praetorians more than bodyguards. Employing the hand-picked auxiliary troops of the Germani corporis custodes for his close personal protection, he had turned the nine Praetorian Cohorts that then existed into his political police; they had become his enforcers and executioners, and via their muscle and steel, they and their commanders wielded enormous power.
It had been wise Augustus’ intent that a check should be placed on the misuse of Praetorian power by emulating the old custom of putting not one but two men in overall charge of these household troops, with both men holding the equal rank of prefect. Augustus’ successor, Tiberius, had learned the wisdom of this through bitter experience when his sole appointee, Sejanus, had attempted to usurp him. Later emperors adhered to the policy of appointing a pair of Praetorian prefects, but Claudius, several years before his death, and under the influence of his last wife, Agrippina the Younger, the mother of Nero, had appointed a single Praetorian prefect, Afranius Burrus.
Burrus, a physically imposing man, had overcome the disability of a withered left hand to become a soldier of great renown before he took command of the Praetorians. He proved to be an honest and able prefect and a clever military strategist, serving in the capacity of what in modern terms would be considered a secretary of defense. Retaining his post when Nero came to the throne, Burrus had been, in combination with Nero’s chief of staff (the famed and flawed philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca), another of Agrippina’s favorites, a steadying influence on the boy emperor for the first five stable years of Nero’s reign.
In AD 62, Burrus had died from throat cancer, although the gossips would claim that Nero, tiring of the prefect’s strict influence, murdered Burrus by sending him a poison-laced medicine for his throat. Following Burrus’death, Nero, on the advice of Seneca, had reverted to the custom of two Praetorian prefects. To satisfy Seneca and the public, he first chose Faenius Rufus, yet another favorite of Agrippina. Nero had earlier appointed Rufus to the post of commissioner of the corn supply. The poet Juvenal said that Romans would be content just as long as they were provided with bread and circuses, and there was much truth in this. The man who controlled the capital’s supply of corn, most of which had to be shipped in from the wheat fields of Egypt and North Africa in vessels of the Mediterranean grain fleet, controlled the lives of the people of Rome. Some of the 150,000 tons of grain shipped into Rome each year was sold to bakers, but since the reign of Augustus, most was doled out free of charge to the poorer residents of Rome and sold to soldiers at a subsidized rate.
Some past holders of the post of commissioner of the corn supply had been lazy; others had been inept, and others still, corrupt. Rufus was an exception; he had gained “vulgar popularity,” according to Tacitus, through “his administration of the corn supplies without profit to himself.” ¹ Yet, just as Rufus was widely known as a virtuous man, he was equally well known as a passive, if not downright timid man. And this admirably suited both Nero and his second choice for prefect.
This was Tigellinus, who, like Rufus, was by AD 64 a middle-aged man. A senator of lowly birth, Tigellinus had been banished from Rome by Caligula in AD 39 for having an affair with Nero’s mother, Agrippina. Once Claudius came to the throne and Agrippina became his wife, Tigellinus was allowed to return to Rome. Early in Nero’s reign, he had been appointed prefect of the Cohortes Vigiles, or the Night Watch. He had soon wormed his way into Nero’s favor by encouraging and participating in the young emperor’s worst vices, particularly his night revels around the taverns, brothels, and back streets of Rome. Tigellinus, who was famous for personally keeping a veritable harem of concubines, had gone on to become Nero’s procurer; whatever Nero wanted, Tigellinus would organize.
It was Tigellinus’ “inveterate shamelessness and infamy,” according to Tacitus, that put him, and kept him, in Nero’s most intimate circle of friends.² In return, Nero had heaped money, property, and favors on Tigellinus. On one occasion, when Tigellinus’ son-in-law was banned from the Senate by a vote of the House for an undisclosed crime, Tigellinus, with Nero’s support, had the ban overturned.
Tigellinus’ co-prefect Rufus, once appointed to head the Praetorians, “enjoyed the favor of the people and the soldiers.”³ Tigellinus, meanwhile, began office universally despised and devoid of respect at all levels of society. Rufus’ popularity meant that Nero dare not antagonize the men of the Praetorian Cohorts by removing him, so Tigellinus set to work to undermine his fellow prefect. After Seneca had retired from the post of chief secretary in AD 62, within months of the death of Burrus, Tigellinus launched his campaign. He began by discreetly reminding people that Rufus had been a favorite of the emperor’s mother. Officially, Agrippina’s name had been mud ever since her murder, on Nero’s orders in AD 59, with the Senate declaring Agrippina guilty of conspiring to kill her son. Still, association with the disgraced Agrippina alone was not enough to destroy Rufus’ reputation or his popularity. Tigellinus had more work to do to increase his power at his colleague’s expense.
Tigellinus progressed to hatching plots against leading men of Rome. According to Tacitus, Tigellinus thought that “wicked scheming” was all he needed to bring him power and that his schemes would be all the more successful if he “could secure the emperor’s complicity in guilt.”⁴ To do this, Tigellinus would, at dinner with the emperor or while out carousing with him, delve into the young man’s most secret fears. And fears he had aplenty. Having grown up in a Palatium rent by intrigues and sullied by murder, Nero was, not surprisingly, insecure.
Like many an emperor before and after him, Nero above all feared being overthrown. Seneca, while serving as his chief secretary, had counseled him not to live in fear, for he could never execute his successor; it did not matter how many men he executed, someone would take his place. But with Seneca out of the picture, no such wise counsel existed, and Tigellinus was able to play on his employer’s insecurities.
Crafty Tigellinus identified the two men whom Nero dreaded most. Rubellius Blandus Plautus had several marks against him. Plautus’ mother was, like Nero, a member of the Julian family, making Plautus distantly related to the emperor. And Plautus had married a granddaughter of the emperor Tiberius. So, Plautus could claim imperial credentials on both scores. And to add to his illustrious name, Plautus, young, charismatic and rich, was capable of charming the people and buying allegiance, should he set his sights on the throne.
Nero had originally been alerted to a potential threat from Plautus a year after he took the throne in AD 54. One of his mother’s female friends had accused Agrippina of planning to marry Plautus, her cousin, and then take the throne from Nero and give it to Plautus. When defending herself against the charge, Agrippina had said that no one would testify against her, even “if Plautus or any other were to become master of the State and sit in judgment on me.”⁵ The charge had come to nothing, and neither Agrippina nor Plautus suffered on account of it. But Nero would not forget that Plautus had the credentials to replace him.
In AD 60, Nero had celebrated his first Neronian Games, which he had created as a festival of contests of both mind and body, along the lines of games conducted in Greece for centuries past and which Augustus had emulated at Rome and Actium with his Actiaca, Greek games held every four years during his reign. Not long after the last poet had spoken his last line in the Neronian Games and the last naked boxer had been crowned victor with a laurel wreath, a comet was seen to blaze across the night sky. According to Tacitus, to superstitious Romans the appearance of a comet was a portend of revolution.⁶ It soon reached Nero’s attention that many people were suggesting that should the emperor be dethroned in such a revolution, then Plautus would make the ideal successor.
Plautus, who lived austerely and discreetly, encouraged none of this talk. Guided still by Seneca at that time, Nero had written Plautus a letter in which he had suggested that for the sake of “the tranquility of Rome,” Plautus “withdraw himself from mischievous gossip.” Plautus had inherited large estates in the province of Asia Minor, and Nero said that there Plautus “might enjoy his youth safely and quietly.”⁷ Taking the hint, and taking his wife and a few close friends with him, Plautus had departed for Asia and a quiet life.
The second man feared by Nero was Faustus Cornelius Sulla Felix, brother of Messalina, who had been the late, unwise, and unlamented wife of the emperor Claudius. Though comparatively poor, Sulla was descended from the same Sulla who had ruled Rome as dictator during the youth of Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great. Well known and well liked, Sulla had in AD 47 married into the imperial family, wedding Nero’s cousin Antonia, one of the daughters of the emperor Claudius. The couple had produced a son, who would have had a claim on Nero’s throne in adulthood, as the next most senior male of the Julian line. But the sickly boy had died at the age of two.
Several years after Nero came to the throne, one of the imperial freedmen, the elderly Graptus, had invented a story that Sulla had planned to murder Nero one night as the emperor returned from his revels at the Milvian Bridge, on the northern outskirts of the Campus Martius. The bridge was then a famous haunt of prostitutes, male and female, and Nero used to go there so that he could take his pleasures more freely outside the city. No proof was produced to support this accusation, but Sulla was ordered to depart Italy and confine himself within the walls of Massilia, modern-day Marseilles in the south of France. Sulla had been living at Massilia ever since.
In an AD 62 meeting with Nero, not long after Seneca’s retirement, Tigellinus had made his move against the two men. With Sulla in southern Gaul in self-imposed exile, and Plautus in Asia, Tigellinus had used their very absence from Rome against the men, claiming that their distance from Italy actually exacerbated the threat they posed to Nero.
“I have no eye, like Burrus, to two conflicting aims,” Tigellinus had said, implying that his Praetorian predecessor Burrus had divided his loyalty between Agrippina and Nero. His one thought, he said, was for Nero’s safety, “which is at least secured against treachery at Rome by my presence. As for distant uprisings, how can they be checked?”⁸
He claimed that Sulla could lead an uprising of the Gauls against Nero, using his family connection with Sulla “the great dictator.” At the same time, he said, he did not trust the nations of the East, which had fond remembrances of Drusus, Plautus’ grandfather by marriage and cousin and adoptive brother of Nero’s own grandfather, Germanicus Caesar. Drusus had won acclaim for his work as a statesman in the East. Plautus’ familial connection with Drusus might be enough, said his accuser, for the people of the East to rise up to support him against Nero.⁹
Sulla had given no indication that he had ambitions to replace Nero. In fact, he showed complete apathy toward politics in general and had never made a single noteworthy speech. This was no defense, according to Tigellinus. That air of apathy displayed by Sulla, said Tigellinus, was a fabrication, designed to deflect suspicion, “while he is seeking an opening for his reckless ambition.”¹⁰
Convincing Nero to authorize Sulla’s execution, Tigellinus had acted without delay. Six days after the co-prefect’s meeting with Nero, a Praetorian execution party landed at Massilia by ship. The executioners burst in on Sulla while he was reclining at the dinner table with friends. The Praetorian centurion in charge promptly dragged Sulla across the table by the hair and lopped off his head while Sulla’s companions watched in disbelief.
It was only necessary for a condemned man’s head to be returned to Rome as proof of his execution. The head was displayed in public, usually on the Gemonian Stairs, which ran down the southern slope of the Capitoline Mount between the Tabularium and the Tullianum to the Forum Romanum. Sometimes, these heads were displayed on the Rostra in the Forum. When Nero saw the grisly object before it was put on public display, he nervously commented that the victim’s hair was prematurely gray.
Plautus’ removal was not as easy to accomplish. His wealth made him well placed in Roman society, with many influential men owing their loyalty to him—because they were his clients or were literally in his debt. So, it was necessary to fabricate a story about his “crime.” Tigellinus had a rumor circulated that Plautus had attempted to bring Nero’s famous general Corbulo, who was now governor of Syria and controlled a number of legions, into a plot against the emperor. According to another fabricated story that ran around the streets and bathhouses of Rome, troops had been sent to execute Plautus but the people of Asia had taken up arms in his defense, and the soldiers sent to be his executioners had gone over to his side, necessitating the dispatch of a larger execution force.
These rumors also reached the ears of Plautus’ father-in-law, Lucius Antistius Vetus, in Rome. Vetus had shared the consulship with Nero several years back and had also served as governor of Asia—one of the most prestigious and sought-after of Rome’s proconsular appointments. When Vetus learned that Tigellinus had received Nero’s approval to execute Plautus and that a centurion was to lead a party of sixty Praetorians to Asia to carry out the act, the father-in-law sent one of the freedmen that Plautus had left behind at Rome hurrying to warn his master. With the benefit of good winds, the freedman’s ship had landed him in Asia ahead of the Praetorians, and he was able to pass on Vetus’ warning to Plautus.
Vetus’ message cautioned Plautus to react not by taking his own life, as many a Roman would have done in the same circumstances, suicide being legal and considered a noble resort by the Romans. Instead, Vetus had said, Plautus should rally supporters around himself and seek every resource to repel the Praetorian detachment. Then, said Vetus, in the delay caused by a message being sent back to Tigellinus by his centurion seeking reinforcements to complete the mission, Plautus could raise an army and go to war against Nero.
Plautus ignored the warning from his father-in-law. Under the influence of two teachers of philosophy, who counseled that he “await death with firmness rather than lead a precarious and anxious life,” Plautus went about his regular routine.¹¹ At noon one day shortly after, he was at the bathhouse. Stripped down to a tunic and an undergarment, he was exercising before entering the baths. The doors burst open, and in trooped the Praetorian centurion and his death squad. At their head was Pelago, a freedman on Nero’s personal staff, who had been sent with the Praetorians to ensure the task was completed.
Without any ceremony, the centurion forced Plautus to kneel on the tiled bathhouse floor and ordered him to stretch out his neck. Unsheathing his gladius, the centurion hacked off Plautus’ head, which Pelago promptly bore away. The dead man’s distraught wife, Antistia Pollutia, came running to find her husband’s headless body. Dropping to her knees, she clutched Plautus’ corpse to her, ignoring the blood that covered her clothes. For the rest of her short life, Pollutia would retain the bloodstained garments worn by her husband at the time of his violent end.
The removal of Sulla and Plautus brought no outcry at Rome. This lack of public reaction, along with the very act of their removal, was a great relief to Nero, who heaped rewards on Tigellinus. These events cemented Tigellinus and the emperor’s relationship and increased the distance between Faenius Rufus and Nero, as Tigellinus had hoped. By early AD 64, Tigellinus’ power was increasing with each passing week.
That power was both financial and political. Nero had made Tigellinus a wealthy man with his gifts and rewards. One of those rewards was, apparently, either the entire Basilica Aemilia, or the basilica’s portico fronting the Forum, which contained a number of shops. This massive building, 330 feet long and 100 feet wide, with two floors supported by columns and massive arches and topped by a third, attic floor, was one of Rome’s major retailing precincts, the shopping mall of its day. At the intersection of the Via Sacra (Sacred Way) and the Argiletum, itself a street known for its cobblers’ shops and booksellers at this time and fronting the Forum Romanum—the Fifth Avenue of ancient Rome—these Aemilian shops occupied prime retail real estate.
Five centuries earlier, there had been butchers’ shops here. A century later, bankers had taken over the site. After a subsequent fire, the shops were renovated and became known as the tabernae nova, or new shops. In 179 BC, work began here on a basilica that was completed by Marcus Aemilius Lepidus. The Aemilian family had added to the building down through the decades. In 55 BC, a new, grander building, the one that now stood in AD 64, was erected on the site by Lucius Aemilius Pailus.
Early in the imperial era, the building had come into the possession of the imperial family. After another fire, in AD 14, the emperor Augustus had it restored. Another renovation eight years later was at the expense of Marcus Lepidus, of the Aemilian family. And now, the structure, or part of it, was Tigellinus’ property. Indoors, rows of marble-floored shops lined a central nave. The basilica’s restored portico, fronting the Forum, was similarly lined with shops and was dedicated by Augustus to his grandsons Gaius and Lucius.
Considered by some the most beautiful building in Rome, the Basilica Aemilia was certainly one of the most profitable, with the shops returning prime rents. To the Basilica Aemilia hurried slaves and freedmen each morning to shop on behalf of their masters and mistresses who lived in the mansions on the nearby Palatine, Capitoline, Caelian, and Aventine hills.
By a 59 BC edict of Julius Caesar, most wheeled traffic was banned from Rome’s narrow streets during daylight. So, it was in the night that merchants’ heavy four-wheeled wagons and farmers’ two-wheeled carts streamed into the city from the outskirts and the Tiber River docks, laden with both manufactured goods and produce, fish and livestock. And dodging around them would be the carriages and litters of the “night livers,” and parties of revelers out on the town, eating, drinking, and whoring. Rome was the original city that never slept. Provincials coming to Rome for the first time would complain that they could not sleep for the din that filled the city from dusk till dawn.
The Basilica Aemilia was not the city’s only shopping center. Rome possessed markets dedicated to the sale of livestock, produce, wine, clothing, footwear, and even markets specializing in the sale of herbs and flowers. Meanwhile, every winding street of old Rome was lined with businesses. Once their tall shutters were pushed back, all shops were open to the street, and a passerby could see the freedmen shopkeepers, their families, and their slave employees hard at work. Many shopkeepers slept on the premises, in cramped lofts above the store, with their families. In the ruins of Pompeii and Ostia today, a visitor might see four or five steps at the rear of typical Roman shops, leading nowhere. In Roman times, there would have been wooden ladders at the top of these steps, extending up to the lofts above the shops.
Countless grimy workshops operated in back streets: tanners and leather workers, with the smell of ammonia thick in the air; carpentry shops; iron foundries, with slaves toiling over hot, smoky forges. Brothels, which were legal in Rome, were usually in the back streets. Some taverns offered prostitutes on the second floor, as their wooden signs decorated with erect phalluses advertised. Brothels, called houses of seduction by some Romans and disorderly houses by others, only operated by night. Many fronted the street. A description exists of a first-century Roman brothel that had a quilt hanging in the doorway, to dampen noise but encourage entry. Inside, where customers and naked prostitutes nonchalantly roamed about, the premises were divided by wooden partitions into small bed cubicles, with a sign outside each chamber naming the prostitute working inside.
Surviving reliefs depicting shops at Rome show a butcher wielding a meat cleaver while various cuts of meat hang behind him; a green-grocer pointing out his fresh produce; a knife seller with his vast array of knives; and a pharmacist prescribing medicine for a patient, while an assistant pounds a pestle in a bowl. Another relief shows a store with fowl hanging by their feet; a woman hands fruit to a slave; wild birds occupy a closed wicker basket; cages contain live rabbits; a pair of chained monkeys sit forlornly on a counter. Wine bars occupied many city corners. More substantial taverns were also prevalent. Wine flagons were chained to columns outside, as advertisements. Large clay amphorae at the rear of the tavern were full of imported wine. When they were empty, these elegant amphorae, which look like giant cigars to modern eyes, were frequently smashed; there was no market for secondhand amphorae.
Hot-food establishments sent tantalizing aromas wafting on the air. Rome’s bakeries and pastry shops offered everything from the standard Roman loaf—round, like a pie, and sliced the same way—to tempting pastry delicacies. In Pompeii, one of the towns that would be buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 and which had a population of roughly twenty thousand, more than one hundred wine bars, twenty taverns, and forty bakeries have been identified. Multiply these numbers by at least fifty for Rome, whose first-century population exceeded a million people.
In Rome, as elsewhere in the Roman world, shopkeepers displayed their goods outside their doors. Hairdressers and barbers sat their customers on stools on the pavement, working on them with razor and knife in full public gaze while exchanging gossip. A poet of the time would complain that Rome was one vast shop. The open doors of Rome’s small, street-side schools revealed young students on stools, reciting the Twelve Tables, Rome’s basic laws, or verses from Homer or Virgil. One of the students in one of the better schools, this winter of AD 64, was the nine-year-old Publius Cornelius Tacitus, the future historian.
Bankers, scribes, and up-market stores occupied the Basilica Aemilia: the best jewelers; importers of ridiculously expensive food delicacies; purveyors of the finest wines, including Italy’s prized Falernian vintages. The brightly colored imported fabrics, particularly silks, of fabric merchants attracted Rome’s wealthy ladies. A relief shows one such fabric store, with rich cushions hanging from the ceiling. Two staff members unravel a roll of cloth for several seated female customers. Fashion and fad drove the shopping impulses in Roman times, just as much as they do today. After he had ceased to be a man of power and of extravagance, Seneca wrote to a friend: “Look at the number of things we buy because others have bought them or because they’re in most people’shouses.”¹²
All this shopping activity generated a hubbub that meant a visitor approaching Rome on the morning of any business day would hear the city before seeing it. The visitor might also see or smell evidence of it on the wind; according to Seneca, the air of Rome reeked of smoke and poisonous fumes from all the cookers of the metropolis, and ashes commonly floated on the breeze from the same source.¹³ Here was Horace’s famous “smoke, splendor and noise of the city,” in this the commercial heart of the empire.¹⁴Tigellinus the Praetorian prefect had a tidy share of that commerce, but he would always be looking for more profit, more rewards, more real estate.
Greed was the driving force of Rome. More than one landlord of the city’s forty-seven thousand insulae, or apartment blocks, had been guilty of setting fire to their own properties in the past. Not for insurance money; insurance was one innovation that escaped the otherwise business-savvy Romans. Landlords would then hastily build larger buildings on the ruined sites, providing smaller rooms and demanding larger rents. The landlords’ profit in such instances was a long time coming. Tigellinus was interested in more immediate rewards.